How I Met Your Mother's Mother Revealed After Eight Seasons

The mother of all episodes, indeed! After eight long seasons, CBS finally revealed the mother's identity during How I Met Your Mother's season finale on Monday, May 13. (Warning! Spoiler alerts below!)

The role of future Mrs. Ted Mosby went to a relatively unknown actress: Cristin Milioti. The 27-year-old actress was revealed at the very end of the episode to be "The Girl With the Yellow Umbrella," which Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor) has identified throughout the series as his future wife.

Milioti is best known for her Tony-nominated performance as "Girl" in the Broadway musical Once. She also starred in the 2012 comedy Sleepwalk With Me, and has appeared on The Sopranos, The Good Wife, Nurse Jackie and other popular TV series.

How did the show keep Milioti's casting a secret? "Part of what helped us is our casting director Marisa [Ross], she sort of has been talking about Cristin for two years now," co-creator Carter Bays told Entertainment Weekly. "It helped that she turned us onto her and then the more we got to know Cristin and see her work, the more we realized, Yeah, she's the right choice. So that definitely helped, because we didn't want to do a big casting cattle call — we were going to make it 'come audition for Barney's cousin' or something."

Milioti's musical background also put her at the top of the list. The show had previously revealed that the mother is a bass player in the band at Barney Stinson (Neil Patrick Harris) and Robin Scherbatsky's (Cobie Smulders) wedding.

And the cast has already embraced Milioti as part of the How I Met Your Mother family. "They all think she's a fantastic actress," co-creator Craig Thomas said. When she arrived on set, Thomas said the crew acted like, "'Here she is, the women we've been waiting for for 10 years!'"